Evaluating Election Campaigns

Education, Influence & Governance

Unlike ruling parties and opposition parties, any 'party-of-the-future' must play a double role at election-time. Not only must it seek to gather as many votes as possible but at the same time it must use the opportunity for enlightenment.

As a party-of-the-future gains power and influence so a third role may emerge, grounded in the need for the party to position itself and its policies for the purpose of governing today rather than tomorrow.

Any strategic and tactical decisions relating to a particular election campaign will represent a compromise between the needs of education, influence and governance and for any assessment of a party's campaign, its electoral performance must be measured against each of these roles.

However there is a time lag between enlightenment and influence. So while it may be possible to assess the success or failure of the influence and governance roles, the jury will be out on the 1998 education effects at least until the manifestos of the other parties appear in 2002.

Electoral Losers

A few years ago J.K.Galbraith in some autobiographical reflections pointed out that even though Adlai Stevenson was heavily defeated in his run for the US Presidency, his campaign was not a failure. Stevenson put forward policies and floated ideas that were taken up by other candidates in years to come...something candidates intent on victory seldom hazard.

What Galbraith is talking about here is an education success (with some future governance success) mitigating an electoral disaster from an influence and 'power now' point of view.

My own report to Fourth World Review in 'Report from a Swedish Election' a few days after the September 1998 Swedish Parliamentary Election related only to the influence role (and to some extent the governance role), but completely ignored the enlightenment role. Is there some way to correct this imbalance?

In my 1989 book 'The Rise & Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997)' my 'Speculations Future' chapter assumed that the rightness of Swedish Green Party's views (truth will always out...eventually) would ensure that the backward-looking grey political parties, in order to protect their governance and influence, would steadily (but always reactively) take upon themselves Swedish Green Party policy clothing.

Green Radicalism

And this is very much what has happened. We are told that we are all environmentalists now. But unfortunately there are still far too few deep ecologists, or sustainable economists, or true democrats or non-technocratic liberals...meaning those liberals who know you can't have the cherry of the liberal order without a cake of nationhood, law and politics underlying it. Indeed there may actually be fewer now than before the Swedish Green Party came on the scene.

The radical aim of the Swedish Green Party is after all something much less superficial (and much more threatening) than environmentalism: in fact nothing less than a spiritual and theoretical transformation in the guiding principles of western society...with a complete inversion of 'societal power' on the side.

And with this in mind we need to ask ourselves whether the Swedish Green Party's education role over the past two decades has been a success or a failure. And in particular ask whether we can measure the success or otherwise of education as well as that of influence and governance in the 1998 election, when in practice education and enlightenment are all bundled up together with power, influence, governance and even respectability...something which matters to Swedish electors.

I believe it may be possible. And here is how it might be done.

Manifesto Analysis

Unless it learns the art of renewing itself, a party-of-the-future eventually becomes an establishment grey party. If it has been successful, it eventually becomes all governance with education deteriorating into propaganda at election time in order to grab as much influence as possible in the political power game.

One of the tricks a grey party uses is to trawl the political market place after an election in order to grab any new ideas that seemed to work. Where they can be made to fit, these new ideas are co-opted for the next election. Where these new ideas are too threatening or too difficult to fit into the party line...or the interests of the party's backers...they are discarded and a strategy set up to discredit (or deliberately ignore) them at the next election.

In general these new ideas will only ever be found in a party of the future. And they will appear in their election manifesto at least one election before reappearing...often in disguise and occasionally in an inverted form... in a grey party's manifesto.

If I am right about this, then one measure of success or failure for the Swedish Green Party's enlightenment role in society could be made by taking the party's election manifestos from 1982, 1985, 1988, 1991 and 1994 and gauging the extent to which Green Party policies have appeared in the 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994 and 1998 election manifestos of the Social Democrats, the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats, the Centre Party and the Socialists. There is a PhD waiting for anyone who manages it.

Party Mergers

From this it may be possible to predict how much of the Green Party's 1998 manifesto is likely to appear in the other parties' manifestos in 2002...which is perhaps more useful anyway...but it is probably too early to throw any light on the success or failure of the party's efforts at political education in the September 1998 election.

However, because of its importance...and the imbalance in the 1998 election appraisal if it is ignored...some attempt should be made to find out whether specific Green Party policies (reduced working hours, for instance) are better understood across the electorate after the election than before...and whether more people are now considering voting for the Swedish Green Party in 2002 than were willing to do so in 1998.

And if this is not so, then it may be necessary to take bolder steps than few, if indeed any, within the party are currently considering. The time may be ripe, for instance, to look seriously at such off-the-wall ideas as a 'reverse takeover' of the rapidly declining 19th century Liberal and Farmer parties. What a powerful force this merger could be in Swedish politics if it got its theoretical underpinnings right.

Political Economy

And the theoretical foundations for such an alliance have been well-made (although quite unwittingly) by John Laughland in 'The Tainted Source: the undemocratic origins of the european idea' in which he sees democracy, parliaments and the liberal order under threat from the 'economism' emanating from Brussels and beyond.

The Swedish Green Party could do the Swedish people a service by seeing that the chapters on 'Fascists & Federalists', 'The European Ideology' and 'EuroMoney Matters' are available as a series of Swedish pocket books by June 1999.

'The arguments between a supporter of the European ideology and an opponent of it,' Laughland writes, 'are not arguments about different foreign policy options or economic priorities, but very profound disagreements between two different notions of the role of the state and law.'

The truth is that, as Shakespeare expressed it, there is a tide in the affairs of men. And the flood will soon be upon us. If we are not vigilant it will sweep away the liberal order and the many freedoms we have come to take for granted for several generations. In its place will be a new fascism that cannot fail to be more brutal and more destructive of the human spirit than anything Europe has yet experienced.

Money Unmaketh Man

And if an alliance against fascism and for the re-establishment of a liberal order is what is called for, then the other side of the same coin must be ensuring that Sweden's Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Conservative parties are publicly exposed whenever they veer away from Sweden's traditional liberal consensus.

And it is often out of naivety and ignorance of the Machiavellian intrigues of European politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats that these parties embrace a New European Order that would be rejected upon the instant by a large majority of the Swedish people were the true nature of their proposed new order shown up for what it really is and for whom it had been conceived.

In an interview with the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported in Dagens Industri on Monday 7th December 1998, the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson commented:

'I don't think there are going to be green parties in the future. Their issues will be gradually absorbed into the established parties. Future political alignments will once again be along the basic left-right axis.'

This remark may turn out to be more prophetic than anyone realises. The side effects are the main effects. Many a right answer has been given for the wrong reason. It's a funny old world!

 
Stockholm, Sweden
December 1998